Marita Bonner is perhaps the most unorthodox playwright of the early part of the century to turn her attention toward the concerns of the African American community. Yet, despite an unusual, nonrealistic approach to her subject, Bonner won a great deal of praise for her dramatic work--as well as for her short fiction--in the black magazines Crisis and Opportunity. Her three one-act plays--The Pot Maker: A Play to Be Read (1927), The Purple Flower (1928), and Exit, An Illusion (1929)--remained unstaged during her lifetime, probably because of the nationwide economic difficulties following 1929 and the subsequent neglect and dismissal of her work as that of a minor author; but each play nevertheless offers a compelling glimpse into the realities of being an African American during the first half of the twentieth century. Beyond merely presenting a portrait of black life in America, as she does in her short stories and...